I
About
Co-founder and CTO of Theseus (YC S24), building visual positioning systems that let military drones navigate without GPS. Famous for assembling a working GPS-denied prototype in 24 hours at a hackathon, going viral on X, and turning that tweet into a $4.3M seed round and contracts with US special operations.
Previous roles
- Software Intern, OPAL-RT Technologies
- AUV Software Team Member, McGill Robotics
- Engineering Intern, BECS Technology
Notable work
- Co-founder and CEO of Theseus, a San Francisco defense-technology company building visual positioning for drones in GPS-denied environments.
- Theseus began after Laffey, Sacha Lévy, and Carl Schoeller built a camera-and-map-based GPS-free drone prototype at a 2024 hackathon and entered Y Combinator's Summer 2024 batch.
- The company announced a $4.3 million seed round led by First Round Capital, with Y Combinator and Lux Capital participating, in April 2025.
- Theseus's current Cyclops product compares live camera imagery with reference maps and reports position to a flight controller over MAVLink while running on commodity hardware.
- In 2026 Laffey publicly reported a 564.4-kilometer, five-hour-plus GPS-denied test flight in Florida and discussed deployments and iteration with users in Ukraine.
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